Monday, June 20, 2016

Before
a film screening halfway through this year’s Provincetown International Film Festival,
one of the festival’s programmers who was introducing the film was happy to let
the audience know that it would be a light movie, and she also mentioned that
filmgoers at the festival sometimes ask why so many movies in the festival feel
sad or dark. I thought it was great to hear this acknowledged, and I’m also
someone who’s quite glad that the films in the festival are often sad and dark
because the world itself is often sad and dark. While escapism at the cinema
clearly has its advantages, good films tend to reflect our culture and society
directly, facing difficult truths head-on and bravely exploring the more
intractable or mysterious aspects of human experience. Almost all of the
seventeen films that I saw in this year’s festival fit that description, and
I’m grateful for it.

I was fortunate to have already seen my favorite film from this year’s festival,
Aaron Brookner’s moving documentary Uncle
Howard, at the Wicked Queer film festival in Boston just a few months ago.
I absolutely loved the movie then, and it definitely rewarded me further on a
second viewing, giving me a chance to notice lots of clever interconnections
that hadn’t been apparent to me during my first viewing. Last summer here on my
blog, I reviewed Smash Cut, Brad
Gooch’s terrific memoir about the same subject, the late filmmaker Howard
Brookner, Gooch’s boyfriend of ten years who died of AIDS in 1989, just before
his 35th birthday. This documentary about Howard’s life and times was produced
by Jim Jarmusch, a film school classmate of Howard’s at NYU and the sound man
on Brookner’s first film, a mid-’80s documentary about William Burroughs. But
what makes Uncle Howard so special is
the personal perspective bestowed upon the film’s subject by its director,
Howard Brookner’s nephew Aaron.

We
see plenty of footage of Aaron as a little boy in the film, growing up with his
uncle Howard and beginning to idolize him over time. Howard’s early death made
him enigmatic to Aaron, understandably, a huge loss to be pursued
and a kind of puzzle to be solved. One striking image late in the film shows
the adult Aaron pacing around a large circle of all of the archival artifacts
that he’s collected from his uncle’s life: photographs, newspaper clippings,
magazine articles, reels of film. The movie’s ultimate message is that memory
is the only thing that really makes our stories, along with someone’s
willingness either to preserve the memories or piece them back together again. Uncle Howard is pretty much the most
gorgeous re-assemblage imaginable, and its closing scene, composed of perfectly
selected and placed found footage, is my favorite ending of any movie
so far this year.

The
documentary that I’d been anticipating most in the festival, David Farrier’s and
Dylan Reeve’s Tickled, certainly did
not disappoint. Farrier, a bisexual journalist in New Zealand, has made a career
of finding offbeat slice-of-life and human interest stories, and Tickled began when he came across
“competitive endurance tickling” fetish videos online, which feature cute
athletic guys tickling each other fully or partially clothed. Of course, these
videos have a massive following among tickling enthusiasts as a kind of very
soft-core pornography. Though it seems like those videos will be the focus of
the movie, the tickle torture turns out to be just a lure into a much deeper
exploration of power, money, and control, all via harassment and humiliation of
the videos’ participants at the distant hands of a manipulative quasi-genius
whose identity remains a secret until nearly the end of the film. Farrier’s
masterful shift of tone into truly suspenseful territory is what makes this
film so watchable.

Farrier
himself quickly becomes the target of homophobic taunting and harassment just
after he discovers and contacts the makers of the tickling videos, produced by
a nebulous entity called Jane O’Brien Media. The documentary’s filmmakers
gradually learn that Jane herself doesn’t exist at all but is merely an
avatar in a long line of assumed identities for a mastermind with an addiction
to hot (and financially vulnerable) young guys tickling each other, as well as
a relentlessly vindictive streak whenever he’s even slightly crossed by anyone
in his path. The psychological motivations behind these behaviors surface
briefly late in the movie, and its one weakness might be that Farrier gives us
only a sad glimpse into our antagonist’s childhood, yet isn’t really able to
explore it further. Nevertheless, the rest of the film gathers its suspenseful
energy from delving as deep as it does into the darker side of human (or
inhuman) nature. Farrier’s courage and tenacity in pursuing the story to its
twisted end are highly commendable.

Another
film that I was quite excited to see in the festival was Tim Kirkman’s Lazy Eye, my favorite narrative feature
in this year’s festival. I reviewed Kirkman’s earlier film Loggerheads here on my blog several years ago, and that film
remains one of my favorite movies of all time. Like Loggerheads, Lazy Eye
also quietly follows a gay storyline, this time in a finely crafted two-hander
that’s solidly built from its resonant screenplay and dialogue. Dean, an artist
turned graphic designer, lives in Los Angeles and owns a weekend home in the
desert near Joshua Tree. One night he receives an out-of-the-blue email from
Alex, with whom he was romantically involved 15 years earlier when both men
were living in New York City, until Alex disappeared from Dean’s life without a
single word of explanation.

Reluctantly
(and not so reluctantly from a sexual standpoint), Dean invites Alex to join
him for a reunion weekend out in the desert. The tension escalates and wanes in
ways that I won’t divulge here, though I can say that I related to the two
men’s situation on an immediate and sometimes heartbreaking level. I think most
gay men have lived through the kind of relationship and loss of a relationship
that Dean and Alex share; Kirkman’s ear and eye are attuned to every small
detail, in a way that’s reminiscent of Andrew Haigh’s wonderful film Weekend from a few years ago. I think Lazy Eye speaks to my own generation of
gay men just as well as Weekend did,
perhaps even more fittingly in our current era of gay marriage. What do we lose
if we opt out of that new social privilege? Will our memories of former
boyfriends and potential husbands transform over time into a long line of
regrets, and if so, then what should we do with those regrets?

Long Way North,
an animated feature film by Rémi Chayé, was just as emotionally affecting as Lazy Eye, but in
completely different ways. The movie, voiced in English, has the look of
beautifully hand-drawn Japanese anime in the tradition of Studio Ghibli. Set in
the late 19th-century, the story follows a 15-year-old Russian girl, Sasha,
whose grandfather is an Arctic explorer who doesn’t return home from his latest
expedition. His great ambition was to plant the first Russian flag at the North
Pole, so Sasha is able to figure out by studying Arctic maps that he left
behind what her grandfather’s approximate location might have been when he went
missing.

The
rest of the film is a gripping adventure tale, one that could convincingly be
told only through the medium of animation. The climate of the Arctic is too
inhospitable and treacherous for a live-action film crew to take on, and since
CGI is basically animation anyway, why not just go with a full-on animated
feature? The film’s payoff is in its extended action sequences: the Russian
ship breaking its way through Arctic ice, nearly running aground, the sailors
digging and blasting through the entrapping sheets of the frozen sea with
dynamite, triggering an avalanche that even further endangers their ship. These
scenes and images escalate the genre of animated film to a new and different
level. I found myself anxiously shouting “No!” aloud at least twice during that segment
of the movie, something I’m certain that I’ve never done before while viewing a
cartoon. It’s best to leave the film’s ending undescribed here; I will say,
however, that the movie’s climax and resolution are elegantly conveyed, while
also remaining understated and Zen-like, despite Sasha’s intensely dramatic
circumstances.

One
of the documentaries that tied for the HBO Audience Award at this year’s
festival, Jonah Markowitz’s and Tracy Wares’ Political Animals, is also well-worth mentioning. The film traces
the careers of four lesbian legislators in the state of California: Sheila
Kuehl, Carole Midgen, Christine Kehoe, and Jackie Goldberg. Collectively, these
women were on the vanguard of gay rights and totally ahead of their time, boldly
and tirelessly advocating for legal protections for LGBTQ students in public
schools, as well as passing early domestic partnership bills. It addition to
compiling compelling footage of their impassioned and movingly personal
arguments presented before often homophobic and pro-religion fellow
legislators, the film is also an informative vehicle for demonstrating how the
legislative process actually works. We watch as bills fail to pass by being as
little as one vote short of a majority, and then we see how these women change
their uncooperative colleagues’ minds by presenting skillful logic in the context
of our evolving culture, just as leaders of the civil rights movement courageously
did in previous decades. I teach a course called Sexuality and Social Change at the university where I work, and I
will definitely plan to show this film in class when I offer the course in
future semesters.

Finally,
I really enjoyed one short film in the festival, which screened alongside Uncle Howard, Brandon Cordeiro’s
poignantly nostalgic ribbons.
Cordeiro is a young filmmaker who was raised in Provincetown, so watching his
8-minute short at this particular film festival, in a town that I’ve visited frequently
for many years, made it even more special. Based on one of Brandon’s own
memories of his mother taking him to an oceanside AIDS memorial at the beach in
Provincetown back in 1997, the short sweetly recreates a young boy’s (and
future gay man’s) entirely innocent response to the social tragedy of the AIDS
crisis, while also providing a snapshot of the LGBTQ community’s wide-ranging
strength at a particularly painful and devastating point in our history. The
title image of long, colorful ribbons streaming in the wind on the beach,
inscribed with handwritten tributes to loved ones lost to AIDS, has been a
feature of the annual Swim for Life fundraising event in Provincetown since its
inception; just as memorable is Cordeiro’s luminous rendition of Joni
Mitchell’s “Circle Game” at the end of the film, sung by the director himself.

At
the ceremony for honorees, Excellence in Acting Award recipient (and lesbian
icon) Cynthia Nixon gave a heartfelt acceptance speech, in which she spoke of
how much she’d loved her first visit to Provincetown to attend this year’s
festival. She also mentioned what a relief it was to be in such a peaceful,
accepting place after last week’s tragic shooting at the gay nightclub Pulse in
Orlando, Florida, and lamented that such a catastrophe could still befall us
now. Her closing words about Provincetown and this pivotal moment in LGBTQ
history will be my closing words, too, because they’re abundantly evident in
the films that I’ve chosen to review: “How good it is to be here, and to see
how far we’ve come.”